For the past 10 years or so, the use of content management systems has become standard among most reservation services providers. While the promise of populating one database that in turn electronically updates several other databases sounds like a great idea, I believe it is in fact a very bad idea. Before I explain why, understand that most reservation services providers have thousands of hotel customers. Each of these hotels has a myriad of descriptive, policy and other marketing information that needs to be loaded in several databases, including four separate global distribution systems, the Pegasus hotel content database and the central reservations system that usually powers the hotel’s website and call center operations. So, from a pure productivity perspective, it is easy to understand why these companies quickly adopted automated content management tools, given the mountains of ever-changing information that they have to process and update.